AGL 074: Martin Wolfe – Distinguished Engineer, CTO – IBM

AGL 074: Martin Wolfe – Distinguished Engineer, CTO – IBM

Today on the show I have Marin Wolfe (Marty). Marty is a systems engineer, creator of new solutions and innovations, a leader and motivator of the best and brightest, and focused on delivering solutions to the most complex challenges and supporting key goals.

Marty is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and CTO, a technical executive of which there are only 600 across IBM’s entire global enterprise. Marty’s combination of technical depth, business acumen and delivery expertise has resulted in over $500M in direct revenue helping to shape technical strategy and fixing the most challenging problems at all sizes of organizations and enterprises.

Marty creates and leads incredibly resourceful, compassionate, innovative, and profitable teams in areas including Cloud, complex systems integration, data science, and infrastructure modernization. His technical acumen has resulted in nearly a dozen patents, several books and publications, and a broad network of business leaders who continue to leverage and depend on Marty for technical counsel and guidance.

Focus areas of expertise include infrastructure transformation using Cloud computing, moving to the use of microservices, and using Blockchain to increase visibility across the global supply chain

Today we talked about Servant Leadership, Gut Instinct, Confidence, Cohesion, Loyalty, and Trust. All of these are important characteristics of good technical Leadership. We also talked about the differences between efficiency and effectiveness and that there needs to be a balance between the two.

Your job is not to be the smartest person in the room…But to take barriers our their way.

We got into some concepts of good communication skills for leadership and the need to be able to explain technical concepts to non-technical leaders.

We got off the leadership topic for a bit and talked about machine learning and AI and the things that are happening with IBM’s Watson.

We talked about the importance of a leader to understand what people are bringing from their past experiences and how to use that as an asset for those folks.

Top take aways for new leaders:

Servant Leader

Work-life integration

Facilitate the collaboration on your team

Spend time with each person

Please note that all ideas and opinions expressed are not that of IBM

Normally this is where I ask for a rating/review/subscribe, but instead, this month I’m asking that you make a donation for Breast Cancer Research in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month